Chapter 49: Interrupted

Always approach shadows with caution. Always. The one time you forget the danger that can emerge from darkness, you will get a nasty surprise.

-Athanaric

Wrend’s agreement to go with Leenda sent a thrill through her. As it was, she almost couldn’t breathe, what with his body almost one with hers. Just her thin shirt separating them.

Nevertheless, she pulled away in order to take his hand and pull him forward, toward the door.

“Wait,” he said. “I need boots. A shirt. Probably pants.”

“You look fine without a shirt,” she said, but didn’t object further as he grabbed his clothes out of the chest and pulled them on.

He moved with a hurried grace, hardly pulling his eyes from her even when he sat on the cot to lace up his boots. She picked the hat back up, and with a sly grin at him snatched the lion from the cot. A prize. By the time she’d put the hat back on her head and tucked the hair up underneath it, he was fully dressed again and belting on his knife.

“Do you really think you’ll need that?” she said.

He looked at the knife and shrugged. “It’s always with me.”

She joined him at the door, and he took her hand as he peeked out of the tent to make sure the way was clear.

“Maybe we should go separately,” she said.

A sliver of light slipped through the tent flap, lighting one side of his face as he looked at her.

“You lead the way,” he said.

“You’ll follow? You won’t abandon me?”

She saw the desire in his eyes and knew he wouldn’t. To feed his passion, she touched his face and kissed him again. When she pulled away, his voice became falsely stern.

“Lead the way.”

She stepped into the night. Not ten minutes had passed since she’d entered the tent, but the night felt different. The air felt cooler in her lungs, and the ground felt softer beneath her shoes. The stars shone brighter. The moon’s thin crescent shone more sharply against the sky. But everything else—the physical shapes around her—seemed insubstantial. The tents, trees, and bushes passed by like ghosts, hardly bearing substance because of the fog over her mind.

She moved fast, taking a circuitous path through the tents in order to avoid the paladins. He followed her at a distance, not as adept at avoiding guards. But they let him pass without issue, and before long they reached the edge of the camp, where the ground sloped uphill in a long, dark ridge. A copse of trees covered the top of the ridge. Krack waited on the opposite side, perhaps half a mile away. At least, he did if he’d kept his promise—which she thought he probably had; she was finally getting through to him.

Paladins, each spaced a hundred feet apart, patrolled the area. They marched back and forth along some invisible line fifty feet out from the camp. As she stood at the edge of the last tent, listening, the paladins in the darkness to the left called out that all was clear and safe. At first it came only as an indistinguishable mumble through the darkness, but it gradually grew louder and clearer as paladin after paladin called it out, going down the line.

“Safe and clear here.”

Wrend crept up behind her—he wasn’t particularly quiet—and she turned as he approached her.

“When I came into camp, I jumped over them,” she said. “I leapt from the top of the ridge into the city.”

He stared at her for a long moment, and it occurred to her that he didn’t know the extent of her abilities—the same ones that anyone who used Ichor could have.

“I can’t do that.”

He said it without looking at her, but she wished he would. She wanted him to lean over and kiss her again. Now, staring at him, feeling him so close, she found that the walk through the camp had not diminished the strength of his pull. It had increased it, as if the promise of what might come had lodged its way between her ribs, into her heart.

“But you can get past them, right?” she said. “They’ll let you out. And I can just leap over them.”

His brow furrowed. “We can try.”

“Just meet me up in those trees.”

She nodded uphill, past the paladins. It would be dark in those trees. No one would see them. Krack wouldn’t know they were there. Her heart raced at the thought, and she leaned up to kiss him, letting it linger for a moment as he touched her cheek with light fingers.

Then she separated from him and bound Thew and Flux to her body. She’d already been harvesting both constantly since leaving the tent; she did it so much, had such experience, that she almost did it unconsciously. Like breathing. She took about a dozen steps back into the camp, so she could get a running start, and with one last look at Wrend, applied the Ichor to her legs and body and started to sprint.

Her hat flew off as she lifted into the air, and her hair whipped in the wind. It was a good jump. Without Flux—just the application of Thew to strengthen her muscles—she would have leapt thirty or more feet, but with Flux she lifted high into the air, in an arc like an unusually tall rainbow. The ground dropped away from her, and she adjusted the path of her flight toward the trees. A paladin looking up into the sky might think she was a large bird passing overhead. The camp and tents shrunk, and she lost sight of where Wrend stood in the shadows. The trees gained definition as she approached them.

She laughed at the wind rushing in her face, at how the ground slipped by her just like it had when she’d flown as a draegon.

As she descended, she applied Flux against her motion, slowing her flight to the point that her foot struck the ground with no more force than a normal running stride, and not much faster. She took half a dozen more steps and came to a stop just a few feet away from the edge of the forest.

She turned back downhill. Wrend, almost invisible in his black clothes, had left the tents and started up the hill, toward the paladin. He had his arms up in friendly greeting. The paladin, its armor glinting in the dim night light, walked toward him. To the right and left, the next paladins over also headed toward Wrend.

Watching the scene from the safety and anonymity of the trees, Leenda couldn’t repress a quiet laugh. Her mate was coming to her. At long last she could spend time convincing him that she was his mate, and he was a draegon. He was softening, and soon he would come with her. She could feel it.

She started to step into the cover of pinion pines, just to be safe, but stopped at the sudden sensation of another presence nearby. Elation evaporated, and she scoured the darkness of the branches. Here and there a hint of moonlight angled down into the needles, illuminating a branch or trunk. Nothing moved, though she could feel someone watching her. Goosebumps rose up on her arms and she stopped breathing, as if that would make it easier to find the source of danger.

And it moved. A massive shape, twenty feet back in the center of the trees, in the uttermost darkness. In so little light, it was just a formless shadow—but a huge one. Four or five times her size.

Athanaric. It had to be Athanaric.

“You may have been my son’s mate,” he said, and strode toward her, “but I am the master of his soul.”

He pushed trees aside as he crashed through the branches. Splotches of moonlight found his face as he came nearer.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t shout, scream, or run. He’d found her. He’d known she was coming and where she would be.

Panic jolted her as an image of that afternoon flashed through her. She'd run out of Ichor and collapsed on the rock, nearly tumbling over the edge and into the patch of purple flowers. The fear of that moment returned to her, froze her in place. He’d loomed so tall over her. He was so much bigger than her. So much more powerful, and he’d had such rage on his face that she was certain she would die. And now she felt it, again.

Only, another fear burgeoned inside her, born of an unexpected question.

Was Krack safe?

That thought—and that thought alone, as even thoughts of Wrend fled her mind—gave her the sudden ability to move again.

And she did.